Free Blood Music by Jessie Prichard Hunter

attempts they accepted his transparent excuses of work and ill-health with the mistaken, lazy sympathy that is incapable of recognizing when death has entered into a life and become part of it.
    Sometimes John and Cheryl had taken walks together in the evenings. Less frequently in the months before her death, when John was happy to lose her to her new friends, her new experiments with night and beer and smoky selections on the jukebox. But they had walked the night before she died. It was a stupid, sentimental detail John refused to ignore: the night before she died. Like a child’s doll in the wreckage left by a hurricane.
    Here was a house Cheryl had liked: somebody had built a funny little turret onto the side of a Cape Cod. Here was the cat they could never get to come to them; John did not try now. Here were all the living rooms they had imagined behind plastic-backed 1960s curtains. All the lives they had imagined.
    John stood a moment, paralyzed by loss. Well-meaning, inept Mary Ellen had said, standing awkwardly in his office doorway, that surely Cheryl would want him to get on with his life. But who knows what the dead want? Who would want to know?
    A cat suddenly appeared at John’s feet, a plaintive soft cry and soft fur at his ankles: the cat who would not come. It was crying now, and it had nothing at all to do with Cheryl and John felt tears welling up. The cat twined around his legs and slipped out of reach. As he stretched his hand toward the warm anonymous fur, his eye fell on a pile of newspapers bundled and tied at the edge of the sidewalk. They had been rained on. SLASHER VICTIM LIVES !
    The cat cried again; there it was on the front page: the Metro Edition. He knelt and groped at the soggy rope that bound the papers; he hurt his fingers and didn’t feel it. An old man on a porch two doors down watched with blank disapproval. Page three, he had cut his fingers on the rope. There was blood on the page now. Seven lines down. One corner of the article tore off and dissolved into ink in his fumbling, bloody fingers. “The victim has been identified as Madeleine Levy, twenty-seven, of the West Village.”
    John scooped up the unsuspecting cat; it hissed once, with vampire’s teeth, and struggled free with ruffled dignity. Madeleine Levy. Her name was Madeleine Levy.

13
    H e drove down the West Side Highway at night, the whores outside the Riverview Hotel waved at him but he didn’t slow down. The rearview mirror joggled up suddenly and he found himself looking into the back of the van. Darkness. There was no indication that there had ever been anybody there. He moved the mirror back to its proper place and the darkness disappeared abruptly into the empty street. There. Walking unsteadily along the sidewalk, blond hair an untidy Marilyn cloud. But when he saw her face she smiled a groggy invitation. Not a whore, never a whore. The easy, the obvious. The virtuosic touch was in knowing: that all women desired death, that Woman subjugated herself to the superior force, the obvious necessity of death. The whores got into death’s car a dozen times a night, they could be killed like cockroaches and who would care?
    It angered him that the papers said it was the moon—that all the loonies come out when the moon is full. It wasn’t the moon. He wasn’t a pickpocket or a prostitute killer or a fare evader down in the subway. As though the eternal, ineffable tableau he created were the product of the same forces that made crabs sidle up the beach or dogs bark in their backyards.
    Hadn’t that one that spoke to him—the one whose voice he’d loved, her honey voice—come to him on a night the moon was not quite half full, an irregular blob in the pitch of the sky? Because the dark one had been unsatisfying. The dead dark eye, the mouse-brown softness against his fingers against her neck. That was the only one he was sorry about. He had wasted his seed and his power